My father can fix anything. He can make the cabinet door work again, the toilet, the light switch. He has toolboxes of cold metal wrenches and sockets and screwdrivers that turn any bolt or screw, whining saws that cut wood into any shape, and gauges with dials that rotate in clicks and snaps to tell him what’s wrong with any cord. He has hammers of steel and rubber and wood. Pliers that cut, bend, and twist. Clamps, drills, straps, punches, tapes, glues, oils, and jellies. A filing cabinet of tiny drawers filled with washers and nuts and hinges and bits of colored wire that he rolls between his thumb and forefinger until he knows which is right for the job.

I follow him around the house, handing him tools and watching him put them to work. His arms and hands, rigid with lines of muscle, move with stiff, metered precision, as mechanical as the tools. As he works, I ask what’s this, what’s that, what’s any and all of it about? Then I answer oh when he tells me about wattage and voltage and Ohm-age, when he explains torque and elasticity and inertia, when he pulls a mechanical pencil and tiny tablet from his front pocket to draw grids and circles and squiggles. I’m eight.

After he hangs the new reading lamp over my bed, he splices an egg-sized hand switch into the lamp’s cord so that when I wake up in the night I won’t have to reach up to the fixture itself to turn it on. I hand him the stubby red-and-blue-handled Phillips head, and he screws together the halves of the switch’s casing with rhythmic quarter turns of his wrist, explaining to me the relationship of resistance to current as he goes. I don’t try to understand. All I care about is that now when I startle awake, I won’t have to lie there panting in the darkness with the covers over my head. I won’t have to scan the room for shadows until panic forces me to jump from the bed and run out my door and down the nightlight-lit hall to my parents’ room to sleep on the floor.

My father holds the switch in his palm and flicks the toggle back and forth with his thumb, turning the lamp off and on, then drapes the cord over the headboard, so the switch lies on the mattress. He tells me to try it. I run my own thumb over the ribbed mold of the brown plastic and feel the coolness of the crossed heads of the screws. It’s the perfect size for my hand. All I have to do is slide my arm from the covers, wrap it in my fist and squeeze, and my room will fill with light.

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